Michaela added: ‘Like any other experience I’ve found traumatic, it’s been therapeutic to write about it, and actively twist a narrative of pain into one of hope, and even humour.’ She added that the production company she worked with sent her to a private clinic, ‘a service they offer to staff when in need’, and that they also funded therapy. ‘Overnight I saw them morph into an anxious team of employers and employees alike, teetering back and forth between the line of knowing what normal human empathy is and not knowing what empathy is at all.' How do we operate in this family of television when there is in an emergency? The first people I called after the police, before my own family, were the producers. It turned out I’d been sexually assaulted by strangers. I emerged into consciousness typing season two, many hours later. I took a break and had a drink with a good friend who was nearby. In the lecture Michaela recalled her own attack, which - like Arabella’s in IMDY- happened when she was hours away from a deadline whilst working on the Bafta winning series in London, Michaela said: ‘I was working overnight in the (production) company’s offices. In 2018 Michaela became only the fifth woman to give the prestigious MacTaggart Lecture during the Edinburgh Television Festival. Just as Arabella’s sexual assault in the BBC drama is inspired by Michaela’s own real life assault (which she has revealed happened when she was working on her comedy series Chewing Gum) the scene in which Arabella speaks out about it to a crowd of people was inspired by real life too. Arabella goes out in London with some friends, before getting her drink spiked after which she is sexually assaulted, leaving her trying to rebuild her life. The drama and discussion in I May Destroy You is centred on one night - a different night and a different assault. Only, she begins to speak not from the pages in front of her but from her own experience, revealing that she had been assaulted by someone in the room, Zain, when he took a condom off during sex and then gaslighted and intimidated her after the event. In her phenomenal new TV show I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel, as her onscreen character Arabella Essiedu, an author, stands in front of an audience ostensibly to read from her book.
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